Sunday 2nd December 2007

It goes without saying that I regret causing distress and upset to Jo over the comments I made in my blog 'Nail Biting Stuff'. This was never my intention. I was merely making a point through parody - a piece of writing in the style of another, so as to be amusing. That is quite different from plaglarism to which Jo accused me of. Plaglarism is taking the work of another and pretending it is one's own. As an 'aspiring writer' I wrongly assumed Jo would see my blog for what it was - a parody. It seems it was ...

Well done to Pussywillow who lives in Ratlinghope and is still "sharp in her mind and her eyes" at the age of 26. Ratlinghope is pronounced "Ratchup". I assume that Pussywillow is pronounced as it is spelt.

Back in September I complained to Kingston Hospital that they had ignored this end of the Borough when arranging their consultation roadshows. And to their credit the Chief Executive responded by announcing an extra roadshow - it will be this Wednesday, 5th December, at 7pm at the Hook Centre. Sadly there seems to have been minimal publicity about this event, so I'm doing my best to...

On Wednesday I was in glorious Liverpool (don't you just know it is a LibDem city?) for a financial inclusion conference. Organised by RUFI. I was one of the speakers, but finding myself as the last one - after the audience had had nearly 4 hours of speeches by then I felt duty bound to keep my remarks short sweet and to the point (actually one of my local supporters once said that was a good description of me !! Maybe that should be the title for my next Blog???!). I wanted to mention this as I was really rather ...

It's true - you can get excited about street furniture. It's a fake, adopted, sort of local government term - "street furniture", but it applies to basically anything that adds to a street scene (sic) and usually covers benches, lamp-posts, water fountains, bike racks etc. Most of it tends to be pretty hum-drum and lacking imagination, and you often see stuff that is so terrible that you tut or just have an internal sinking feeling. But just occasionally you see some that is, well, good to excellent... So this on Station Approach, Kensal Rise was a really pleasant find...

Welcome to the 40th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (25th November - 1st December), together with a hand-picked quintet you might otherwise have missed. Well, Saj Karim’s defection did at least achieve one thing - it knocked the party leadership [...]

Has anyone resident in London been to the Imperial War Museum recently? It was my favourite museum in London and I went there quite a few times during my stay. I have just opened my email and realised I have missed a highly interesting sounding day of lectures on the history of the poster - one particular talk sounded very enticing - 'Packaging the Reich' - about how important the poster was to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. If anyone went or can tell me about it please let me know.

In the season of advent many thoughts turn to a mythical image of a pastoral and peaceful Bethlehem. However the reality is somewhat different these days. On Thursday evening I joined a packed audience in Bedford for the latest Riding Lights production Salaam Bethlehem. Based on real life stories from the oft forgotten Christian community in Bethlehem it tells the moving story of those who are marginalised and oppressed in their own land. For Christians, Muslims, Jews, those of faith, those of none, this is a powerful and disturbing story. It has already incited the wrath of the Zionist lobby, ...

Isn't it fantastic that Vince Cable has received positive write ups in practically every newspaper over the past few days? The Sunday Times has a lovely series of photos of Stalin morphing into Mr Bean. He has now blasted himself into the stratosphere of superherodom as far as I'm concerned by repeating his wish to be considered for Strictly Come Dancing If Letitia Dean, Alesha Dixon and Kelly Brook, with their prior dance training, can go on, why not Vince even if he does have prior ballroom experience? He'd be the new Bill Turnbull who, 2 years on, still has ...

It has struck me at least three times this week that many people seem to expect things to happen without thinking that they could be one of the people that makes those things happen. Last night I attended the 70th Anniversary dinner of Chelmsford Round Table. In common with Round Tables across the country they do a great deal for the community with the backing of very few. Amongst other things,

The current issue of 'Tribune', the self-styled voice of the Labour left, contains an interesting piece by Ian Aitken, formerly of The Observer. In it he describes Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrats as such : " If there is a 'great clunking fist' anywhere in the Commons, it belongs to Vince Cable' !!! Certainly his line about Brown transforming from Stalin to Bean got many laughs at PMQ's this week. However, this is one of a number of consistently impressive contributions by Vince as stand-in leader. He's not my cup of tea politically in party terms, but I have ...

Oliver Burkeman had an excellent investigation published in the Guardian's Weekend magazine yesterday. It examines the reactions to terrorist threats to air travel over the last thirty years, with input from experts. It draws the conclusion that governments are forever reacting to the last threat to airborne security with physical measures. But they are unable to keep ahead of the terrorists.

It’s been hard to avoid acting Lib Dem leader Vince Cable in this weekend’s papers - almost every single look back at Gordon Brown’s latest week from hell has highlighted Vince’s “from Stalin to Mr Bean” gag at last week’s PMQs. There are three feature profiles in: The Observer: Is it funny? Try it out on [...]

OK I've had a herbal tea and calmed down now. I've promised myself I won't blog on the leadership election - very few bloggers are apart from Linda Jack, Paul Walter, Cowley Street and Mark Pack on Lib Dem Voice (all quite tough sounding people who can cope with the erm 'feedback' they get I'm sure). So I think I'll go back to writing nice thoughtful posts such as my previous post on the campaign for gender balance (which, by the way is still being commented on) which unite the party and may actually result in something productive happening...

Iain Dale sees it as too close to call. The overall figures (all those mentioning a candidate) were 56% for Clegg, 44% for Huhne. In principle it is a sizeable lead but not out of reach. The complication is that many people have already voted. YouGov put the figure at about 50% - and calculate that Clegg has a 58% to 42% lead among those who have already cast their vote. If this is correct it suggests that Clegg has a lead of around 5000 votes in the urns (assuming around 32000 people have voted). So to win, Huhne needs ...

Just when you thought it was safe to pop out to the shops... From today's Sunday Times: America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

Labour spin doctors seem confused as to what differentiates their many crooks from our one crook from a few years ago. Here’s a handy guide to spotting the difference. One donor approached the Liberal Democrats – not the other way round – and offered a large donation. We never offered any favours. He never asked for any. He never received any. Watchdog the Electoral Commission says we made all the right checks, and he looked all right. After months of investigation with nothing to do with the Liberal Democrats, police and fraud inspectors found out he was actually a crook. ...

Like everyone, I owe a great debt of gratitude to our NHS. But these days it is struggling - with budget cuts, ward closures and superbugs. People are struggling, too - with cancelled operations, complex bureaucracy, and little sense of control over their own health. I want an NHS ordinary people take charge of. But [...]

If you think Labour have been pushing their luck here in Britain, you've seen nothing. The illustration shows a letter sent by the United Russia Party in Kemerovo region to the director of a company there. My Russian is limited to the words and phrases I gleaned from chess magazines, but I am assured that a rough translation is: I consider your refusal of financial support for our regional party of United Russia for the election campaign for the State Duma of the Russian Federation to be a refusal of support for President Putin and his programme. I will inform ...

This Sunday's video comes from one of the great British bands of the 1960s, though they are sometimes overlooked in the histories. How was it that in the middle of that decade geeky grammar school boys suddenly found themselves able to write and perform music like this? One thing's for sure: it had nothing to do with government rolling out benchmarked plans for popular music across all sectors, or however they put it these days.

And so our week with Rutland's most celebrated peer draws to a close... Sunday Whom should I meet at a café on the Great North Road but Huhne and Clegg? One is on his way to a television interview: the other is on his way home from a constituency dinner. I cannot recall which was to be interviewed and which had just dined, but then I often have trouble recalling which is Clegg and which is Huhne. Our conversation turns to the annoying way that both the Labour and the Conservative parties have been thieving our policies of late. "What ...

It seems that the police have given up hope of recovering the Tax Credit disks in their unexamined state, and are now searching rubbish dumps. Now there is confirmation of a careless attitude to data security in the Department of Work and Pensions. The revelation that a contractor took personal copies of sensitive information, over a year ago, might not have been made if journalists had not been following up the story of the Tax Credit disks. Liberal Democrat Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Danny Alexander MP has written to Peter Hain calling on him to act to restore confidence ...

And at last we have the manifesto of the left of the party: not the manifesto of social liberals - we are all social liberals here. You could probably skip straight to this chapter. Paul Holmes apologises for straying beyond his remit, but it would have been interesting if more of the authors had done this. Many incomplete manifestos don't necessarily make a complete one. My problem here is that

Today I finally got around to watching the DVD of Taking Liberties which I won courtesy of Liberal England - and I urge anyone who cares about freedom in this country to do the same. I was already aware that the Labour government's record on civil liberties was terrible, but even I had my eyes opened as to just how poor it actually is. When someone can be threatened with arrest just for having the word 'peace' written on a cake, you know the idea that the UK can be considered a country in which freedom is valued is unfortunately ...

Remember the case of someone taking JK Rowling to court as her book slightly resembled a character another author had written about previously (only that one didn't sell so well)? Plagiarism is theft of someone else's words and putting your name to them. This happened earlier today after publication of a controversial post I wrote about Team Clegg... The words Huhne and Clegg were switched. But one sentence remained the same. This is illegal. It's theft. Writer's are taken to court for less. Don't break the law. Read my blog entries by all means. Just take away your impressions...not the ...

...or maybe that should be "New Labour Years: Clause Four to Guinness Four"... I remember it quite well; as a blue button on the floor of the Stock Exchange in early 1986, though my stock-jobbing firm did not deal in brewery stocks the partners were taking a great interest in the Guinness-Distillers takeover as their future sugar daddy, merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, were in the thick of it as corporate financiers to Guinness. Then (and maybe now for all I care) the "Takeover Panel" was a committee of senior city figures who acted as a sort of a referee to ...

Having blogged a couple of days ago in response to Jo Hayes's comments about Nick's qualifications, I heard from Dr Julie Smith, who confirmed that Nick had in fact had a position teaching on her course on the Politics of European Integration, taught to the MPhils in Contemporary European Studies and in International Relations in 2004-5, at Cambridge University and that it was a bone fide paid position. I hope that clears it up and we can go back to considering the breadth of qualifications necessary to lead a political party.

{Prog 1565} Two weeks to Prog 2008, and things are coming to a close (I’ve been saying that for a while now, haven’t I?) Cover: The mysterious Karel Toten from The Red Seas, as rendered by Steve Yeowell. A dramatic enough image, and Steve Yeowell is on good form at the moment. Quote of the Week: “Slaughterhouse! The is Dredd! Kitty is dead! The woman you think is your wife is just an empty shell! They tricked you Slaughterhouse!” Judge Dredd (speaking through the cybernetically-controlled corpse that was Slaughterhouse’s wife) Spoilers (in addition to that one)… (more…) Share This

Undecided as to who should get your vote? Perhaps this will help. Mr Huhne's view of his party as a haven for disillusioned Labour voters seems tailored for the days when Tony Blair was the target. Mr Clegg is more focused on reclaiming Liberalism from David Cameron. Chris Huhne's vision is great for fighting the last election battle; Nick Clegg's looks better suited for fighting the next one.

Good heavens - only 12% in the lead, why wouldn't the Clegg camp be all of a panic! Come off it Jo - I would have hoped you would have noticed that I for one have toned down my criticism of Chris and even my biggin' up of Nick. There are still a lot to make up their minds, of course, but I would say it looks pretty clear that Nick will maintain and even increase his lead, if I was a betting girl, which I'm not, I may be taking Mike Smithson's advice at the moment...........seeing Clegg as a ...

A number of commentators and bloggers in both camps have been talking about the closeness of the Clegg vs Huhne race and interpreted the 12% poll lead as a nail biting finish creating panic in the Clegg camp. Well if the Huhne supporters think he is closing in with a chance to win they certainly aren't putting their money where their mouth is. Huhne has actually now drifted out to 4/1 on betfair and the sums being bet on him even at these odds are minimal. I have now stopped putting money on Nick as there is virtually no money ...

Shortly after I posted my own comment on Miranda Grell’s failed appeal, she posted her own: Following yesterday’s decision at Snaresbrook Crown Court to uphold my conviction for two offences against the Representation of the People Act 1983, I have, this morning, resigned from both the Labour party and my job working for the Deputy Mayor of London, at the Greater London Authority. Although I know I am innocent, what I have been convicted of amounts to bringing the Labour party into disrepute and gross misconduct of the Greater London Authority constitution. I cannot expect either of these organisations to ...

Stuck for something interesting to watch? May I suggest you click on the link below. The film, 57 minutes long, gives a view of the Israeli 'Iron Wall' from a human rights and international law standpoint. I admit the picture quality isn’t great but the soundtrack is good and the voice-over is particularly impactive. The narrative explains the difficulties and obstacles that the illegal settlements, or colonies, along with the Wall itself, are causing. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4866316426876380615 P.S If you do watch it I would be interested to hear your comments.

If you haven’t heard that St. Martins-in-the-Fields stopped Cristina Odone from using their pulpit to rant about how religious people are persecuted last week, you simply haven’t been paying attention. She was banging on about it on the Today programme and now has a column in the Observer saying the same thing: When a Christian cannot speak out in church for fear of censure, alarm bells ring. The citadel that threatens to emerge from this new world order is like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials in reverse: the dogmatic oppressor is no longer the omnipotent church, but the omnipotent secularist clique ...

Acting Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable has been having an excellent time of late. Almost every political story to hit the press has carried a prominent Cable quote. His performances at PMQs have been widely praised, and commentators are starting to wonder if he shouldn’t have stood for the top job himself. The Lib Dems seem to have been enjoying a recovery in the polls, with ICM putting us on a healthy 19% last week. To top it all, activists have even set up a Facebook group in appreciation of the soft-spoken economist from Twickenham. How do you think he ...

Over a hundred people (a sizeable proportion of them Asian) assembled in a Chingford hotel last night to hear the two LibDem leadership candidates, as well as Lord (Eric) Avebury, victor of the now legendary 1962 Orpington by-election. Eric was originally to be the guest of honour at the Walthamstow constituency annual dinner, but local PPC, [...]

Internationally respected journalist, Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker last month, reported on the US's plan for Iran: He wrote about a series of public statements in recent months by Presiden...

Completing a good week for Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems the Observer today has become yet another newspaper to back Nick for Lib Dem leader calling him an 'authentic voice for modern liberalism', you can read the whole article in today's edition of the paper.

I still haven't voted yet. Neither has my wife. I'm still not sure I'm going to. You see, I believe a leadership election should be about leadership and I'm not sure I've seen or heard enough about that yet to make me want to put a cross against either name. Still there is a while to go and I live in hope. Otherwise I wouldn't be a Liberal. I would be the first to admit that Liberal Democrats must be an awkward bunch to lead. I'll go further and acknowledge that I'm probably even more awkward to lead than most! ...

I have been reading all the blog entries on the leadership election and have noticed one change recently. Team Huhne are getting desperate. They know they are 12% behind Team Clegg and they are racking up the negative campaigning machine. Previously entries from Huhne supporters were full of praise for their man rather than criticism against Clegg...now the mood has changed. With probably only a quarter of Lib Dem members still undecided and well behind in the polls, it seems panic has set in at Team Huhne. Every poll, every report, every blog, even every sentence now written about this ...

... but in the view of the ongoing diplomatic incident over a teddy bear (a teddy bear for heavens sake) and his death on live TV last night (Marcus what were you thinking?) I think these these are particularly appropriate...

I’m still one of the undecideds. I really have no idea who I should vote for. But the question I’m asking myself is, should I bother to vote? Last time around I voted for Ming, then when I went to conference I got evil stares from my Huhne friends and I have the feeling that whoever I vote for this time, the campaign team of the other will be making remarks about why we would have been better off with theirs and the stares will return. But if I don’t vote neither side can blame me (unless it turns out ...

From today’s Scotland on Sunday: THE businessman at the centre of the Wendy Alexander donation scandal was backed for an honour by senior figures in the Labour Party, it emerged last night. MSP Charlie Gordon, who resigned last week as Labour’s transport spokesman after it emerged he arranged an illegal donation from Jersey tycoon Paul Green, has [...]

Hundreds of miles of roads need to be built in Wales to avoid gridlock by the middle of the century. Who says so? The RAC say so. They believe that the our roads could grind to a halt by 2041 if millions of pounds more are not invested in Britain’s ageing infrastructure. Well, it is not as if they do not have an interest is it? The Wales on Sunday report that more than 100 miles of motorway – 56 per cent more – alone will need to be built here by 2041, while across the whole of Wales 650 ...

I have been reading all the blog entries on the leadership election and have noticed one change recently. Team Clegg are getting desperate. They know they are only 12% ahead from Team Huhne and so are racking up the negative campaigning machine. Previously entries from Clegg supporters were full of praise for their man rather than criticism against Huhne...now the mood has changed. With a quarter of Lib Dem members still undecided it's all to play for and Team Clegg are biting their fingernails with anxiety...

Full credit to Katie Hanson and LGBT Labour for these comments from the Waltham Forest Guardian: The Labour Campaign for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (LGBT) has issued the following statement: “The Labour Party has a proud record of equal rights and promoting gay equality. “Over the last ten years the Labour government has transformed Britain [...]

There is a great thread of comments still unfolding on my previous blog entry - Campaign for Gender Balance, Jo Swinson and female bloggers. Everyone from Lynne Featherstone MP to Charlotte Gore has commented and you will learn a great deal from scrolling down the page...

Lots of postings on Miranda Grell's unsuccessful appeal. I understand that at no stage Miranda has apologised to Barry Smith, although she still denies what the courts have found her guilty on, she does acknowledge making up lies about Barry. This verdict isn't just justice for people who live in Leyton and deserves a hardworking, honest councillor, but also justice for all party activists (no

I had intended, as the title suggests, on writing this upon my return (from Olomouc) to Praha. Sadly some fiends in the hotel were consuming the internet facilities, and so it is being composed a day late in a bedsit in London. In spite of being caught in a snow-storm amid the derelict ‘autobus nádraží’ in Znojmo, the trip to Brno was relatively smooth. Various literature describes Brno as ‘the Manchester of the Czech Republic’, ‘the Manchester of Moravia’, ‘the Manchester of central Europe’ and so on. I was thus expecting to be rained on incessantly amid factories, mini-terrace-houses and ...

Before the Ming stood down we had the same old problem that we had had for many years. A complete lack of knowledge by the general public of anyone on our front bench. Aside from Ming and Charles Kennedy, only the politically interested could name any other Lib Dem front benchers. This has started to change. Firstly, Vince Cable has stepped up to the mark, gained good publicity for his expert knowledge on Northern Rock and for the way he highlighted Gordon Brown's Mr Bean qualities. Take with the knowledge now that Vince also wants to have a go at ...

The linked story is about more lost disks. The government admitted during the week that they had not acted to stop data losses. There needs to be a ministerial signature for any more disk transfers. Then we know who gets sacked if disks get lost.

I thought you might like to see this statement from LGBT Labour, which I've reproduced from the Waltham Forest Guardian. The Labour Party has a proud record of equal rights and promoting gay equality. Over the last ten years the Labour government has transformed Britain into a more equal and tolerant place. We are furious that a Labour candidate, Miranda Grell, was willing to use homophobia to get elected. Discussing the sexuality of her opponent and spreading innuendo about his relationship was a disgrace and made her unfit for office. To also tell lies that he was a paedophile is ...

I must have sent over a dozen emails to BBC Radio Wales' "Good Evening, Wales!" about subjects as diverse as, say, government structures in Wales and the management ethos of the Labour Party, but do they broadcast them? Do they thump. However, in a weak moment last week, inspired by the story of Lottie, the fugitive Swansea sheep, and Felicity Evans (I think it was) commenting on the name of one of Lottie's family, I wrote to say that I remembered an earlier ovine Letitia. She was the sister of Larry the Lamb in the Toytown stories from "Children's Hour" ...

As part of West End Christmas Week, there's a "Footprint" event at Logie and St John's (Cross) Parish Church next Wednesday from 10am to 5pm. The event is being run by the Dundee City Council Leisure & Communities Department and will see lots of fun activities, information on recycling, charity shop displays, samples of Fairtrade food - and lots more! You can download a poster about the event by clicking on the headline above.

Why are people so impressed with Vince Cable? Lots of MPs have been complimenting his abilities in a way rarely seen in the Lib Dem Party and there is a group on Facebook - 'Cable so able' - which has 110 members. When I was a temp - a true temp - where you can clean your desk in a minute and be unemployed and living on baked beans the next - surprisingly everyone was extremely nice to me. Everyone was keen to tell me that the job could lead to something permanent. I was rarely criticised. I think this ...

Doesn't last summer seem like a very long time ago ? Labour had a big opinion poll lead and the Lib Dems were languishing down at between 12-14% in the opinion polls. how things can change. In the wake of the Labour party funding crisis and the Lib Dem leadership contest, the lib Dems have made a steady climb up the polls, and the latest poll has more good news for the Lib Dems too. The ICM opinion poll for the News of the World showed Labour had slumped by five points to 30%, with the Tories up one to ...

Those of us politico-anoraks who have been trying to call the Lib Dem leadership election by the political equivalent of sticking a wet finger in the air can put away the divining rod, scrub out the scrying bowl and stick Mystic Meg on the number 83 bus home. For finally we have rejoined the world of science, with these cold hard numbers courtesy of Sky News and YouGov. The result of the poll of 678 Lib Dem members was as follows: {43% Huhne: 33% Undecided: 24%} Despite a 10PM news embargo, the numbers had leaked throughout the day thanks to ...

I sent a fax via WriteToThem to my local MP, James Clappison, a couple of weeks ago asking him to support Amnesty's campaign to close down Guantanamo Bay. I received this rather disappointing response today: So, by implication he supports torture, extraordinary rendition and the detention without trial of persons on severely questionable legal grounds waiting for a war with ill-defined goals to

Any of us who actually live in the real world read with a certain amount of incredulity and a whole lot of laughter the article in “Political Diary” in the Courier yesterday which claimed Dundee LibDems “were certain of coming of coming second and had a decent chance of winning” the Lochee by-election. This is simply not true. I think we can all work out Steve’s “source”, who undoubtedly deserves a tartan P45. If Steve's source seriously believes we thought that, from less than 7% of the poll back in May, we were going to win the seat, they are ...

The OSCE, the Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe is to be led by Kazakhstan, a country that does not even follow the commitments of the OSCE in its own borders. Whatever next ? Iran to head up the International Atomic Energy Authority ? Mugabe to become General Secretary of the Commonwealth ? Perhaps Gordon Brown to be in charge of the electoral commission ?

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